Fugitive Slave Act

Fugitive Slave Act (1850).Drafted by Senator James Y. Mason of Virginia and the product of months of contentious debate in the Senate, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was signed into law by President Millard Fillmore as part of the Compromise of 1850. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, an ardent critic, denounced the law as unconstitutional, but Daniel Webster, in a famous speech on 7 March, supported it as part of a larger political effort to preserve the Union. The southern senators John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis doubted that the law would achieve its purpose, but they did not oppose it. Organized opposition to the law in the North faded after the summer of 1851. The Supreme Court in Ableman v. Booth (1859) affirmed the law's constitutionality.

The Fugitive Slave Act authorized newly appointed fugitive slave commissioners to issue warrants for the arrest of runaway slaves. In a federal proceeding, before fugitive slave tribunals established by the act, the commissioner summarily ruled whether the person described in the warrant was indeed the person claimed by the slaveowner or the owner's agent. (A court record taken in the state from which the slave had escaped was deemed sufficient proof of ownership.) This summary decision could not be appealed, nor could state courts issue writs of habeas corpus.

The law's historical significance lay in the white South's belief that it was not vigorously enforced, that northerners had acted in bad faith in passing it, and that the southern states were therefore justified in seceding from the Union. Out of a total of 332 cases, federal tribunals remanded 157 slaves, 68 at government expense; 141 fugitive slaves were captured and returned without due process of law. The law was also of significance in inspiring Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Fugitive slaves were returned from Washington, D.C. to owners in the free states as late as June 1863, but Congress repealed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1864.
See also Antebellum Era; Antislavery; Civil War: Causes; Slavery: Development and Expansion of Slavery; Slave Uprisings and Resistance.

Bibliography

Stanley W. Campbell , The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860, 1970.

Stanley W. Campbell